Carry Me Home
by UnagiKeki
Summary: Gai and Lee vignettes, on hope and handling things; just little cute theme stories for my guys.
1. Soldiers

**AN: So, yes. Gai and Lee. They are the beasts. I'll be adding to these little drabbles, so keep track and maybe something good will come out of it.**

**And NO, this is not yaoi. Put your tongues back in your heads, ladies.**

I have only one request of you, because I love you so much and because you have destroyed me.

When the sun is fading, blood-red streaked with cheerful orange where the sky begins each day, come and find me. You found me that day, and I have never been the same; I have a will now, a freedom nursed by right and wrong needs and wants and fears, the right to chase assassins with all my life.

Come to the fields and find me, in however many pieces I am in. I might be asleep, dead or better off so, broken and bruised; I might be screaming in agony, my blood pumping with infection or I could just be fine. I could be savoring the kiss of grass blades against my face, watching the world with glazed-over rabbit eyes. Find my tiny heartbeat amidst the great, pulsing horrors of your day. This is all I ask.

Loving you is a balance between loving myself and building my own destiny. I will never, ever blame you; these coal-colored eyes only follow you with admiration, an affection and admiration of the purest kind. I don't need to be your blood son; you are already closer than any father could be, the one I don't talk about. You are my mentor, my saving grace, my deliverer and my dearest heart; you are Gai-sensei, and I owe you the debt of a hundred lifetimes. But I still need favors.

Pick me up, gently if you will. Gather me against your strong chest, like I'm a little Genin who's worked himself to exhaustion again by midafternoon; let me feel protected, because that's what I want to be able to do for you someday, Sensei. Gather up my good intentions, and don't let them scatter to the wind.

Carry me home, Gai-sensei. Bring me back from the places I train and force myself into, and remind me why I do it. Just be there. Carry me home when I've gone too far, and face the setting sun with me.


	2. Himawari

We brought you some sunflowers, so you can remember us.

I love their bright little faces, their beady centers like a thousand earthy eyes; the rays of schoolbus-yellow radiating out, little suns on stems we pull out of a big, wet bucket at the Yamanaka flower store just for you.

I remember fields and fields of these, walking forever beside you and trying to fill your footsteps. I remember chasing Frisbees and walking on my hands, laughing and sobbing, aching and talking, just talking to you about every trouble I've ever had, trying to decide if it was worth being concerned with. I remember looking at our reflections in a puddle, and blossoming warm from head to toe when I realized that I look a little bit like you (in the eyebrows). I remember the long, hot days spent locked in training and fighting for our lives, and then the cool caress of sunflower leaves against my sweaty skin as we fled, laughing, from our fears. It was our world, in that perfumed field that sprung alive with tiny purple sage in the spring, sunflowers in the summer, and small green things in the winter of my downheartedness. I brought you sunflowers, so you can recall those sweet times and remember how much we all miss you, Sensei.

We miss you so much. Me and the field, me and the sunflowers.


	3. Limbs

**AN: Perhaps the angstiest addition to the stories. This is an old work I kind of half tried to patch up, so... ergh. Forgive me. I just loved the idea of Gai and Lee losing limbs. (You always hurt the people you love, haha.)**

**As a sidenote, _jizo_ are kind of like 'angels' for dead babies; read _Memoirs of a Geisha, _because it's wonderful and then you'll understand.**

* * *

Get it, can it; burn it, release it, weather it; curse it, fall before it, wait it out until you go out yourself, like the candle in the room with a dripping ceiling, dancing, dancing in the dark until you putter into it with a wonderful, sizzling sound: your last breath.

----

They come back in bunches, bloodied and blackened inside and out. Sakura sees the holes punched clean through them, through their body and spirit and out the other side, but she can't fix that. So she stitches; she paints Bentadine, mops gaping wounds, reminds her body that it's only job is to breathe, keep breathing. She is an automan, and her duties take a separation from herself so complete that she sometimes goes to hover in the corner high above it all, remembering to inhale, exhale, inha-

And then they bring Lee in, the crumpled entirety of him. His jawbone is cracked, unhinged; and his eyes are opened in the deadened stare she knows too well, the one that takes her and wrenches her against old, spiky walls; the shame and guilt and need to rise against all of this unfairness. Years of training through sleep have made him conscious every moment, so he stares at the ceiling that clots and bleeds before him, unlike his own blood. She doesn't know how much he sees, how much he comprehends.

Only that the inability to breathe is all that keeps him from screaming his throat bloody.

It takes a moment to separate herself from her body, from him once more. When she turns around, they hand her his right leg.

----

He's grown as wrinkled as the _jizo_ that stand eternal, stony watch over the corners. There are dead children in Gai, the ones he's killed and the ones he's destroyed the minds of, but he's a protector nonetheless. But when you get down the whole moral nitty-gritty, is protecting only his village even a dime in the bank, worth the lifetimes he's spent at it?

He's too tired to think about it, right now. Carefully, he massages the stump that still gives him pain. A little boy, skin taut and painted with green, darts across the meadows of his mind laughing, smiling, wanting to learn to walk this walk.

In the end, has it protected the one he cares for the most?

----

He doesn't feel it anymore; not the pain, or any pleasantness left. But Lee doesn't say this. He knows he's fortunate to have what he does. The walls rise, and he punches them down; when he can only lie down and cry, Gai slings him over his good shoulder and hunkers forward, taking them down for him. Even with one arm, he has never dropped Lee.

In a way, they're brothers, now: having been disattached from something so vitally them, so vitally human that it seems completely wrong, even more wrong than being Shinobi and all it entails. They have been crucified with their Christ (their nindo ninja paths to hell) , and have only each other's dependence to go on for, faith having forsaken them. Where are the arrows of outrageous fortune? They seem to have barely dodged them, just like the other arrows slung at them- the real ones, the kunai and shruiken aside.

They sit down in the grass one scarlet evening, Lee staring at the worthless string of flesh and atrophying muscle that gives out on him after too long at training. He is broken, and he used to fear when he was, that no one would acknowledge him; that they'd just trample him, like the cripples and the beggar children.

But they can't afford fear any more. Gai never looks at where his own arm used to be, and even without it, he carries a banner that Lee cannot help but follow.


	4. Atomics

**AN: Lee-centric...and, uh, I dunno. Too much Carl Sagan in my diet, I guess. Trying to get to the point of being profound, but failing miserably.**

* * *

You play with fire, you get burned. Touch a toad to get warts; sell your soul, and how do you end?

He wishes his heady fate were cliché, predictable like that. Besides the determination which underscores him, there have been enough stones thrown to pave a path to his destination; and while he swears they don't sting, he carries each one in the cells of his cells, like a disease of sorts. He's long stopped believing anything negative that's said; now he just absorbs it, quietly, like the core of a silent atom. But Lee has been taking it for a long time; maybe his heart is the bottomless bag the gypsies are supposed to carry, and yes, perhaps it is possible to find the heaven various cultures have in mind: a complete separation, a sense of contentment in a lack of sensory stimuli. Maybe it's all he needs.

… Or maybe the hearts of atoms are only quiet for an instant, before they violently reject all that's been given them in a radioactive fury.


	5. Great Heights

**AN: Oft used idea, but I was in a 'cute' mood. Love Lee. 3**

** Thanks, all, for the reviews thus far! They've been unexpectedly positive and very much appreciated. I'm so glad to know that I'm not nearly as bad at writing as I thought I was...**

* * *

I thought I was going to die.

It was hard to hold onto you, but that doesn't mean I didn't try. I was trying to crawl up onto your head while staring into the abyss, like a petrified baby monkey, my whole body carved hollow from dread. You laughed and met the sky, but I refused to look up; all I saw was a chasm, the long fall I had been dreading since those kids teased me that day that I could never become a ninja. It was uncertainty alive, roiling in my veins in response to the lonely plunge that awaited. I was sure I wasn't going to make it this time.

But then you shoved me square in the back. I still remember the shock of the open air, the feeling of my limbs flailing in emptiness, my legs pedaling with dead instinct; my eyes stung and my heart seized, and if I had been a cat, I would have used up all nine lives before I hit.

Slapping the forgiving water, bubbles; my scalp refreshed and freezing and my sides stinging from the impact. I swam up, with the most base action known to humans. Keep swimming, keep swimming-

When I broke the surface of the water, the sky swirled dizzily; something circled my ankle and yanked, hard, on my leg, and I screamed with what little voice I had. And then you surfaced beside me, laughing and hooting to beat the band, the currents of your paddling keeping me afloat.

"See? You're fine, you're fine," you told me over and over, and I jumped again and again after that; I would go flying off the cusp of that rock, remembering our leap for joy, and that you had been beside me the whole time.

And I _was_ fine. Just like you said.


	6. Grandkids

**AN: Gainess. Shriek with me.**

* * *

I used to think you were the greatest kid on earth.

You remember- I used to blather and praise and do what was best for you. I beat your face in, but I always hugged you afterwards; and I taught you the things you needed, whether people thought I was right or not. You were the greatest thing to happen to me, and I showed it. I was so damn proud of you- My Lee, the star of the perpetual show and the shining purpose of my life! How I've loved you, wanted to protect and be with you always. It was just peachy.

So, yeah- you used to be all that…but not anymore.

Then, you had kids. And I'm sorry, but I now consider _them_ to be the cutest and most perfect things on earth. It's a grandpa's obligation; sorry, my precious pupil.


End file.
